The Effectiveness of Cooperative Concept Mapping for Meaningful Learning of English Language in Students

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effectiveness of the cooperative concept mapping on English academic achievement and the meaningful learning of reading comprehension in students. The participants were 51 female students in third grade of high school in Karaj city who were selected through purposive sampling. This was indeed a quasi-experimental research with pre-test and post-test and control group design. The participants were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. In the experimental group the students were taught to use cooperative concept mapping, while the control group was not exposed to such a learning technique and the students in this group were taught reading comprehension through the traditional approach of reading a text and explaining its content. A teacher-made achievement test was used to assess both the students’ knowledge of English language and their meaningful learning of English reading comprehension, with the latter being tested through questions that involved higher-order cognitive processes (i.e. analysis, synthesis, evaluating). The data was analyzed using t-test, which showed that the students in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group in their English language achievement and meaningful learning of reading comprehension. This indicates that using concept mapping as a learning strategy has a positive effect on students’ meaningful learning and development of English reading comprehension.